How should those who build and maintain decentralized systems be compensated, and how can we ensure their incentives remain tightly coupled to the long-term health of their organizations? This challenge, which we call the Alignment Trilemma, has long shaped institutional design. But in traditional systems, the tradeoffs are structural and persistent. As a firm scales, it almost inevitably deprioritizes one of these groups—and it’s rarely the teams. Decentralized systems offer an opportunity to
